Her bare feet slapped against the pavement.
Tulle skirt stuck to her sweaty thighs.
The first drop fell.
Rain came that day.

Arms outstretched, she started to twirl.
Until the footsteps came near.
Out of time with the thunder claps and bursts of light.
She stopped and stared.

He was there.
Drenched in the rain.
Watching.
She laughed and pulled him to dance with her.

This one here's me aged three
at a trestle table for little ones,
snapped with a box Brownie
at the Miss Rosebud parade.

Fresh as a daisy in crepe paper petals
under an eternal sun.
There's my brother dressed as a magpie...
just out of shot.

I remember that dress.
Yards of love sewn into a snowdrift
of crisp petals tumbling into my lap
under the Singer where I sat shuffling

impatiently to the machine's rhythmic rattle,
mesmerized by my mother's puffed-up feet
on the treadle,
my brother's whining cry...
just out of shot.


copyright © Caroline Grace 2011

Throughout my life I've pledged to make you mine.
As if, by wish, this vow would then come true.
So, would I practice words of pretty rhyme,
and, with my heart, would offer them to you.
Oh, how I wish myself to be a poem;
To enter through your eyes into your heart.
For it is there I wish to make my home.
I cannot bear that we should ever part.
But sometimes, when I search to see your face;
I, startled, see you looking back at me!
Could God, in kindness, spare a gift of grace;
or does He smile on simple fools as we?

Still, artfully I do the things I do.
The world might sing if I could speak to you.

Meandering through the billowing trees
A cold, almost winter sky coats the forest in a haze
Fallen branches and withered grass
Crunching beneath my feet with every small step

Your ghost fills me like a flood
Every breath, crystalizing my lungs

I can feel you
I can hear your sullen whispers blowing past the trees with the wind
I can smell the distinct scent of your skin as if you were cradling me in your arms

You are the trees, and the ground
You are the blurred light peeking through the fog
You are love, and you are life
You are here
But nowhere else

I’ll close my eyes
Let me remember the planes of your face
The slight curve at the end of your smile
Let me hear your soft voice
The sound of your sleeping exhale

Time has carelessly erased the memory of you
Leaving only fragments
Mere glimpses into the past
Nothing more
I’ll collect the pieces
Like shards of shattered glass
And keep them close to my heart
Strolling through the wilderness
Only thinking of you

when thought sleeps deeply in the darknesses of the soul
and the mind ticks steadily on
the body's at rest
and sleep comes sweetly
then, that is peace

but when memories of golden days past
stir themselves in the cold brightness
a certain tightness forms in the darkness
travels to the throat
and if tears cant come to wash it away
it sticks
and that is pain

The dim flicker of but the brightest of stars
Is all that reaches me here, in my urban prison.

To see the night sky properly,
To see the shimmering arc of the milky way,
The light of four hundred billion suns painted across the sky.

Such a sight would reach not just to me, but into me.
It would reach my soul, and light it with the warmth of the universe.

And there I could be free.